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My pet peeves M$ won't fix

(or Window$ Woes)

  • The cost.  It's no wonder the U.S. is falling behind technologically.  And when is the last time have you've actually heard of a scientific breakthrough that was more than just something new to spend your money on?

  • Bloat.  As soon as chip designers have developed faster technology, MS has already devised a way of squandering the extra performance doing something useless in the background or adding more decorative elements to an already overly complex GUI.  Thanks to this mindset, which has been mimicked by  Apple and the Linux community, there has remained an underclass of people who find computers perplexing and even a waste of time.  Maybe they have a point.  Can you really say that what we do with computers today is more advanced than it was when DOS was king?  Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the prospect of sending humans to the moon has become increasingly economically prohibitive.  When a scientist is running calculations to optimize some new rocket propulsion design, his or her computer is spending half of its processor time just making sure things look pretty on the screen.

  • In Vista and all subsequent versions of Windows, Microsoft has eliminated the 'up a folder' or 'parent folder' button from the Windows Explorer toolbar.  Have you figured out their idea of Post-XP folder navigation?  I haven't.

  • The registry, viz. 'Add/Remove Programs'.  This is possibly the root cause of the Mac's continued existence.  It seems to me that if Apple Mac software apps can consist of a single file, then M$ could have come up with a Windows OS based on the same tenet.  Ask yourself why your Windows PC gets slower and slower and slower over time.  The answer is the Registry.

  • IE7,8,9,10,11 - occasionally certain folders will not open from the Favorites menu.  Others have posted this problem on the Internet, but there does not appear to be a known solution.  I can at least report that the problem does not usually persist in a new tab when it is opened.

  • The last several versions of Excel have lacked a browse button when selecting the default file save location. Word and most of the other Office applications do have this browse button. One would have thought that this oversight would have been fixed in Excel 2007 or 2010, but it is still conspicuously absent, giving rise at least in my mind, to the belief that core Office code has been reused for the last 15 years. How can Microsoft produce more secure office applications by doing this? All they appear to be doing from version to version is rearranging the user interface. If users want better security and usability, then how can they be satisfied with features that move around from version to version? They've taken things out of logical, hierarchical menu systems and laid them out in haphazard ribbons of unintelligible icons which obscure valuable screen real estate.

  • The icon in the upper-left corner of every application, which if clicked displays the options to Move, Size, Restore, Minimize, and Close, will occasionally change to a white rectangle. This occurs when the application is extremely busy. This behavior in itself is not problematic, but it does call attention to the fact that despite Microsoft's claims 15 years ago during the transition to 32-bit computing that their NT and Windows 95 Operating Systems used 'Multithreaded Multitasking'.  Poppycock!  If you so much as click a mouse button while the aforementioned icon is a white rectangle,
    then you risk being given the option to send an error report to Microsoft.  Joy!  If you've ever used a Sun Workstation, you'll have experienced what Windows has never been able to achieve--True Multitasking. By this I mean a smooth transition between an application that you've just made busy to another application which is idle and ready for your input.